Install Subway Tile In A Shower, step by step

It is about to get exciting…

But first, I have to start off this post with a brief side story. I enjoy Jones Soda, partially because there are random little fortunes under the cap. I got this one the other day:

Tasks where skill is essential (sounds like a bathroom remodel to me) may be accomplished. MAY? Only may?!? That is not a quite confidence-inspiring fortune. Good thing we seem to be doing more than “perhaps” accomplishing our latest bathroom projects.

Take tiling for instance. Even though Sherry gave you a peek at the tile job last week, I am back for the official tiling post as promised. You may recall from Chapter Three of our bathroom redo project that my dad and I spent a four day weekend-on-steroids putting up drywall and cement backerboard in preparation for re-tiling our shower surround and our floor. Thanks to a few “challenges” during the weekend, I barely got to start tiling the shower by the time my dad left that Monday evening. In fact, I was in the midst of it when this goodbye photo was snapped.

I worked for another couple of hours after he left, but by the end of the day I had only managed to tile a mere two rows. Sigh. Yes, it looked like another part of this project that would not be as fast or as straightforward as I had hoped. But why?

Well, our tub was not level. So my original plan of using the edge of the tub as my guide went out the window (once we admitted to ourselves that having slightly unlevel lines would look “off” sufficient to bug us – and realized that we’d risk the tiles not lining up correctly at the corners). And while I have seen some people recommend finding the center point of your wall and starting there, with such small tiles it was more essential to us that we did not end up with a sliver of tiles running along the edge of the tub or the ceiling (we hoped tiles to look as full as possible in those places for a more planned and balanced look). So I spent most of that first evening using a wet saw to shave off varying slivers of ceramic from the bottom side of each subway tile that sat against the tub to create one level line that I could build off of from then on. It was a good three or four hours of tedious trial and error-ish lively, but I got ‘er done.

I am not being sarcastic when I say “lively” though. It was simply the kind of home improvement project I enjoy – it involved more mental concentration than physical strength (after all, I have already had my fill of that for this renovation) and it resulted in a big change that I could immediately appreciate. Plus I got to try out some new tools and learn some new skills. But since it was my first time tiling, I will give you the brief play-by-play about how I did, rather than an official “how-to” since there are certainly varying methods (all of which would work depending on your preferences) and because this was my first tiling fling. For true expert walkthroughs, I suggest checking out some of the sites that I referred quite a bit during my stint as Mr. Tile (I included the links at the bottom of this post for ya).

But on to the nitty gritty tiling details. First, let us look at my weapons of choice:

• Wet saw (borrowed from my dad)
• Tile cutter (purchased halfsies with my dad)
• A couple of big buckets of thinset mortar adhesive
• Margin trowel (again, borrowed)
• Notched trowel (ditto)
• 1/16th” spacers (for the floor, the subway tile conveniently had built-in spacers that achieved a 1/16th” space naturally)
• Tape measure (already owned)
• Level (already owned)
• Pencil and sharpie to mark cuts on tile (since pencil did not show up on dark marble)
• Paper towels and a bucket of water (to assist manage the mess)

The wet saw and tile cutter were my tag-team tools for trimming tiles to the ideal sizes. The wet saw is like a circular table saw with a thick masonry bit, but the blade runs through a tray of water to keep it from overheating, wearing down too swiftly or spraying too much dust (it does, however, create a pleasant “mud” that needs to be cleaned up every so frequently). The wet saw was strong for making small cuts (like when I needed to trim simply a little bit of tile) and non-straight cuts (like notching semi-circles to go around pipes – though I did have to break out my dad’s hole saw drill bit once to go through the middle of one tile). You can make straight cuts with it – it even comes with an adjustable guide – but I found I could not be as precise with it as I’d like. And as much lively as I had using it, it was a bit on the messy side. I kept it in the bathtub while working on the shower (it was conveniently at my feet) and in a heavily drop-clothed area in the hallway when working on the floor. Had it not been the middle of winter, I likely would’ve worked outside.

The tile cutter, on the other hand, was mess free – and fairly plain to use. It is only for straight cuts (like when I had to cut half tiles to create the staggered, running brick pattern in the shower). Once I marked where to cut my line using a pencil, I lined up the tile against the flat guide surface then ran the compact scoring wheel a few times across the surface of the tile. I consistently waited for the nails-on-chalkboard style scraping noise to know I was doing it right. Then with simply a little bit of pressure, the angled pad helped me snap the tile cleanly. The only bummer was that this tool was not powerful sufficient to cut our thick marble floor tiles, so I had to rely solely on the wet saw when it came to the floor (but at least by that point I was more of an expert with it since I did the tub/shower surround first to “warm up”).

Cutting was the slow, tedious and mathy part of the whole process. Setting the tiles was fairly speedy and painless by comparison – the only challenge was using the right amount (and a consistent amount) of thinset mortar to make sure there was sufficient to hold the tile, but not too much so that tiles would lay unevenly or cause excess thinset to squish out between the grout lines (spoiler alert: I was not so hot at this).

So after slapping on a hunk of thinset to the wall and spreading it around a bit using the back of the margin trowel, I switched over to the notched trowel. This trickly little fella has two straight edges and two notched edges. First, I used the straight edge to even my thinset (by running it across the wall at a 45 degree angle with sufficient pressure to leave a thin-ish coat on the wall). Then I’d go back over the area with the notched edge (again at a 45 degree angle and a bit more pressure this time) to leave long grooves in the thinset. Then I was ready to press the tile into place using sufficient pressure to set it firmly into the thinset so that it laid evenly with its neighbors (which you can conveniently check with a level).

I picked up a pointer along the way about how to tell if you are using sufficient thinset by prying up a tile right after setting it and making sure the whole tile has thinset on the back of it. If it does not you need to use more. Though this is where I made my life harder. I likely overcompensated and used too much in some places, which created a lot of extra thinset squeezing up between my tile grout lines. Not a large deal… if you are diligent about cleaning it all out before it dries (I suggest a combo of your finger, a paper towel or even an old toothbrush). I learned my lesson the hard way and spent a good chunk of a Saturday knocking dried thinset out of the cracks with a razor blade (which is a lot harder than removing it when it is wet). Gotta leave room for that grout after all, right?

After that first evening of tediously tiling the bottom row, things moved fairly swiftly since most of the tiles were whole (except for the edges and corners). I was able to accomplish the rest of it in two 5-hour sessions after work on Tuesday and Wednesday of that week. Victory was mine! In fact, we would’ve had the whole thing grouted that next weekend had it not been for two errors on my part: the aforementioned messy grout line cleaning that had to be factored in at the end, and a plain label-misreading that caused me to ruin a batch of grout by mixing in twice as much water as it required. More on that later in the week, but simply know that the snowstorm that hit that same weekend prevented us from driving out to get more so we were on tiling “pause” for a bit. Not to be deterred, we turned our attention to the walls.

We primed them with a special Valspar drywall primer and landed on Benjamin Moore’s Dune Grass as our subtle muddy greeny-taupe hue of choice. We in fact did not use Benjamim Moore paint though, we simply brought a BM swatch to Lowe’s and had it color matched to their no-VOC Olympic Premium semi-gloss bathroom paint (the base is no-VOC but we did learn that adding color to it makes it low-VOC, which was still extremely mild and low odor). We figured it was in fact a pleasant plan to get as much painting out of the way before laying our marble floor so we did not have to worry about paint drippage quite as much. Hooray for glad accidents that cause grouting & floor tiling to be put on hold and painting to commence! It all worked out fairly nicely (and painting feels like 1st grade arithmetic compared to the advanced algebra-ish challenges of tiling).

But then it was back to the floors. I first wrapped up the prep job my dad and I had began by installing the cement backerboard (that he kindly cut and set aside before he left the previous weekend) over the plywood subfloor (pointer: we used extra long screws to ensure that they went all the way through the backerboard, through the 3/4″ plywood underneath, and deep into the diagonal subfloor for a especially strong and uncompromising hold). Once the four puzzle pieces were securely set and generously screwed into place we used mesh tape and mud to fill the seams and any remaining gaps. After giving that a day to dry, we sanded off the extra and did a thorough sweeping so the backerboard was 100% free of any dust or cement crumbs that could spell disaster for our tile.

As eager as I was to break out my wet-sawing skills again, we first had to plan our placement strategy to ensure that the layout looked good and that it was the smartest plan when it came to tile cutting (we hoped as many full tiles as possible in the most visibly spots and since we had to work around the curved tub and linen closet entrance we did not want to end up with awkward slivers). Again, some recommend finding the center of the room and working out from there, but with such a small room we thought our criteria (having large tiles where the floor was most visible and avoiding dreaded tile slivers in corners) was more essential in our case. So we did a dry run of a few arrangements with our actual 12″ x 12″ tiles (including spacers!) and settled on a layout that called for fairly plain cuts and allowed us to lay full tiles nearly the whole length of the bathroom. Here is a shot of the guidelines that I drew to start everything off:

I will not bore you by repeating the process of laying the floor tiles, since it was largely the same as laying the wall tiles. The only brought in challenge was that, as hard as we tried, our floor still had a teeny bit of a slope to it. So we opted to “back butter” our tiles to assist compensate for this (we also heard that with marble many experts recommend this technique to keep things extremely firm and wiggle-proof for less cracking and long-tern wear and tear). This meant spreading a thin layer of mortar on the back of the tile in addition to the floor (using the same notched trowel technique) so that we could be more precise about making sure each tile was set level to its surrounding tile friends. And while we relied on a level as our main guide for levelness (is that a word?) we broke out a little quarter trick recommend by a friend to double-check ourselves. We gently ran a quarter across two neighboring tiles to see if it went smoothly or if it caught on one (meaning one was set too high).

The other trick someone taught us, which came in handy big time with the floor, was an straightforward way to measure any cuts that you needed to make against a wall. Once you’ve set the closest full tile, place the next tile that you want to use carefully on top of it (I found the rubber spacers helpful in creating a small buffer between my tiles so nothing got scratched). Then take a third, spare tile and place it on top of the stack, but this time slide it gently until it touches the wall. Simply like that I’d exposed the portion of the middle tile that would be needed to fill the empty space. Then I simply used my Sharpie to mark a cut line on the middle tile and headed off to the wet saw for a little trim. Lo and behold, this worked like a charm every time.

Tiling the floor, since more than half of the 37 tiles required wet-sawing, took me most of Christmas Eve (as much as I could do before we had to hop into the car to spill the beans about our baby girl bean to the fam) and another few hours of the evening when we returned home on the 27th. So all in all it was a lot of work, but dang it felt good to be a gangster to be done with all that tiling. Though I was sort of gonna miss the wet saw. We had some good times together.

Laying the floor is not the end of this tiling adventure though, since we still have the grouting and sealing process to share. But once again, that is sufficient for now. I will post later in the week about the rest of our holiday bathroom adventures so stick around (is that a Thinset pun? it was not intentional).

As I mentioned above, we referenced quite a few experts for our first foray into tiling. We found that instructions can vary and are rarely exact to your specific situation, so be sure to keep in mind what will work best for you and your home. Here are some links that we used that will hopefully come in handy for you folks as well: All Bower Power, AskTheBuilder, eHow, Home Depot, and Lowe’s.

Psst- Wanna read about the first few chapters of the big bathroom makeover? Check out Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three and a little teaser post that we lately shared.